It seems that staff have seen a intranet message stating the company is to stop selling HD-DVD players and that no more stock will be purchased, another nail in the coffin methinks. My source is an employee.

Wait a week and see what happens. Could be a prank or fanboyism.

But on the other hand Blu Ray blows HD out of the water on 90% of films.

A Currys employee with accurate information, well there has to be one

Both HD formats outperform broadcast HD just as DVD is better than broadcast SD movies, the problem for mass adoption is simply the cost of the hardware and the disks.

I haven't verified this myself, but someone on High Def Digest has said that the online stores aren't showing up any Toshiba players, so there may be something to this rumour.

According to who, most posts & people ive spoken to say the PQ are very similar & these people have both formats.

I assumed he was talking about the difference between broadcast HD and optical HD, there is practically no difference between a movie that is on both optical formats even when using any of the three different codecs.
The quality of HD media has far more to do with the original master used than the different types of optical disc.

According to me and many others on avforums ( a site where professional reviewers post ). The black levels on Blu Ray blow HD away. And the capacity is also much much bigger on Blu Ray, also the bitrate on full Blu Ray films is lots bigger than the HD films.

Trust me, when you have a 50" you notice the difference.

Ah ok lol, professional reviewers post now ive heard it all, your not the only one to read the AV forums but then again Blue ray fans would say that anyway. So the poeples whos posts I have read (on the AV forums) that have both formats are talking out of there asses then.

Take more note of Jarraks post.

[quote=Kojack;21512733 professional reviewers post now ive heard it all.[/QUOTE]

Yes, "professional reviewers" - people who take money in order to give a good review!

My source is an assistant manager in a Norwich store and is suitably miffed as he's just bought a Toshiba HD-DVD player.

Don't Currys give refunds to their own employees then?
Amazon refunded full price to many people who bought HD DVD players over the holidays and then returned off the back of the Warner announcement and some just then went and ordered a new one at the much lower price a few weeks later

It also calls into question the assistant managers awareness if he bought a HD DVD player off the back of the January bloodbath but does kinda make some sense in the common belief that Currys staff know sod all about the products they sell

hehehehe

Well the condition of the master plays a part but that's the same for HD DVD, Blu-ray and broadcast HD but I would have thought Black Level performance was far more a factor in terms of TV performance not media.
Care to provide a link to some of these reviews on AVF where they say that the PQ for the same movie on both HD DVD and Blu-ray is better on Blu-ray while also making it plain that this could be a factor with the particular player used for the test and another Blu-ray player may give inferior results.

Blu-ray has more capacity but again it's not a given that that automatically means better picture quality as many disks use the space for uncompressed PCM not improved video bitrate. It also a truth that there are diminishing returns in throwing more bitrate at an encode especially when using mpeg4 codecs.
The greatest laugh in this debate is the use of single frame under 200% mag and flicking between the HD DVD and Blu-ray version then saying one part of the image is slightly sharper thus proving that Blu-ray is better



If you have a 50" display (which type and model after all they play a huge part in how HD looks) and you have both formats that why mention reviews?
For use to trust you then you should be talking from personal experience otherwise you are just parroting second hand information

How can black levels be better on one format than another? It's a digital signal (HDMI) that's passed between the player and the TV and if the signal on HDMI says black then it will be as black as the TV will make it.

In theory HD-DVD could be limiting the dynamic range of the information so that they never sent a true black number but it doesn't make any sense that they would do so.

It could be that the transfer wasn't as good on the HD-DVD you compared so no true blacks were recorded but that's nothing to do with the media itself. What film was it you used to compare?

hey guys ! spare a thought for the assistant manager in Curries in Norwich, you know the one with the HD DVD player, now everyone knows he leaks company confidential information

Netflix in America have dropped HD DVD as well.

I can see their point in not buying new content from now on and only supporting the format until 2009 but given that HD DVD will still be a sizeable niche product I would have thought a company the size of Netflix would have made money from the format or at least kept it just for marketing.
They must have thousands of DVD's that are not rented as much as some HD DVD's but of course cost per unit is strongly in favour of DVD even little known releases

Best Buy have just announced they will be favouring Blu-ray heavily from March. They believe it's the format people want.

Not that they have much choice in the matter

BD may have a larger capacity but they certainly are not making any use of it.

The pictures I saw on my Tosh HD DVD player for the few days I had it were easily as good as the BD pix on the PS3.

The upscaling on the Tosh was better.

Many of the "professional" reviewers on AV Forums receive free gear and free movies so they may find it hard to be unbiased,and they spend more time reading the spec sheet than viewing in the real world

Yeah - remember many of these "professional reviewers" are the ones who recommend spending £50 or more on a friggin HDMI cable.

Indeed.

Popped into Currys today for some clippers and spotted an HDMI lead for £60

Hardly a problem, there are at least six of them covering 3 stores.

I was a very Happy HDDVD customer and though it pains me to say it; it's all but over now

Darn you Sony....

Well it must be true I read it in a magazine right next to a review for a £500 HDMI lead.